Archaeology and the New Testament
THE John Rylands Library Bulletin is always full of interest, primarily for scholars, as in the seventy pages of photographic facsimile of recently discovered Syriac MSS. of Apocryphal literature contained in the present number, to which we shall presently revert, but it also appeals to all who take concern in art and letters. We are particularly indebted to the con- tributions of Dr. Bendel Harris, as brilliant in scholarship as they are happy in expression ; in the first place for an article on "Glass Chalices in the First Century," and Secondly for his Introductions to three " Woodbrooke Studies," in which edition and translation have been supplied by his friend, Dr. Mingana.
In his own epigrammatic way Dr. Bendel Harris writes : "Leonardo da Vinci asks me to say that he was following the historical method in painting a restaurant and not a church, and a table rather than an altar." Well, it is an old comment that the great fresco of the Last Supper was a powerful, if unrecognized, agent in the revolution of men's thought which brought about the Reformation. Dr. Harris alludes to Dr. Salmon's " tunnel " theory of Church history ; some change, of whose causes we are not fully aware, befell the Church between A.D. 60 and A.D. 100. The prophet enters the period, and the priest emerges ; the Agape goes in, and the Eucharist is evolved ; the Lord's Table goes in, and the Altar comes out. Leonardo boldly returns to the primal period, with results on the imagination of his and succeeding ages which he could not have foreseen. He has always been sup- posed, however, to have committed an anachronism by placing glass cups on the Table. It seems now, from a dis- covery by Dr. Deissmann, that drinking cups of glass were in extensive use, and " would be on sale in the Jerusalem bazaars of the first century " ; indeed, in Egypt they were the cups of the poor, and probably of a Church which said, "Silver and gold have I none." Perhaps it was a little mistake to crowd references to the "Grail cup into the paper. The Grail, notwithstanding Tennyson's Idylls, may not have been the Cup of the Last Supper at all, but a pair of cruets (seen on Somerset monuments as the arms of St. Joseph) containing the blood, or sweat, or water from the pierced Side on the Cross. Moreover, there is a vast Grail literature, and it is not so certain that the Legend was not adopted from obscure Eastern sources as an Angevin manifesto against the Papacy ; at all events, there are connexions, and the first Chronicles
hail from the Troubadours of Provence, a seat of heresy, and from a chaplain of Henry II.'s Court, Walter Map. We have lost a clue ; we do not even know the reason of the ever- smouldering vendetta between the House of Anjou and the official Church. Dr. Harris makes an interesting philological point when he states that " Sangreal " has been wrongly divided, and "should read, not as San Graal, but as Sang Real, or Royal Blood, which suggests that the legend has come across from France, and that there was never anything of the nature of a Grail." Little doubt of the first deduction, we should say ; much of the second. But we must not pause. On the rim of these drinking glasses has been discovered a legend : "What cue you here for ? Be merry." Adding the salutation, "Friend," and omitting "Be merry," Dr. Harris detects an allusion to Christ's words to the traitor Judas in Gethsemane : "Wherefore art thou come ? " It is a sug- gestive reference, and doubtless the Revisers were in error in altering the question to a command, although they had the authority of one Latin MS.,the Armagh Gospels, behind them. But Dr. Harris, like most commentators, fails to note the Lord's constant Socratic use of the question, interrogative, rhetorical, ironic ; it was a marked trait of His teaching, is common to all four Gospels, and is especially noticeable in moments of emotion, such as would be the crisis of the Betrayal. Luke alone records nearly a hundred questions of Christ.
We must now turn to the other contribution of Dr. Rendel Harris, his introductions, of engrossing interest and charm, to the three documents, a New Jeremiah Apocryphon, a New Life of John the Baptist, and Some Uncanonical Psalms. If it is difficult to understand the mediaeval mind, the mind that craved for apocalyptical literature is still further removed from us. It is, however, increasingly important to take it into account. For it colours part of the Gospels, portions of the Epistles, and all of the Revelation. Of apocryphal writings in general it may be briefly said that they were dictated either in circumstances of stress, to prophesy future triumph for the Church or the people of God, or to gratify natural curiosity by filling up obvious lacunae in the history of Christ, or, as in our second instance, of the Baptist. There is a special point of interest in the Jeremiah Apocryphon. It is written in " Garshuni," that is, Arabic with Syriac lettering. To us it is the wildest mixture of names and dates : Jeremiah, always a Jewish hero, Ebedmelech, Baruch, Ezra (whom the Koran thought to be a Jewish divinity), Daniel, Ezekiel, Nebuchad- nezzar, Cyrus (unexpectedly a villain of the piece), and the Archangel Michael all play parts. We must leave it to Dr. Harris's ability to explain the real value of the medley, to indicate proof that a Greek text underlies the Arabic, and that, in the account of the triumphal return from captivity of the Jews, Tatian's Diatessaron, with its account of the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, has been drawn upon. But something else has been drawn upon. A phrase; "the branches of palm trees," is used, and the waving of palm branches is mentioned only in the Fourth Gospel. But this is not all. A peculiar expression is employed : "the hearts" or "pith of the palm trees." Now in an early Irish Gospel known as " Armachanus " we get a similar rendering of John xii. 13, "medullas palmarum." Comparison with other attempts to render the word into Latin suggests that this is the first Latin rendering, and since there is a similar Syriac translation of Leviticus, where the Feast of Tabernacles is described, "we may say," writes Dr. Bendel Harris, "that it is a Syriac Gospel of John which has furnished the pith of the palms' both to East and West." At any rate, here is the earliest known quotation from John, in an Apocryphal writer who is under the influence of the Infancy sections of both Matthew and Luke. And the inference is that the date of the Fourth Gospel is at least very much earlier than the latter half of the second century, where it was once the critical fashion to place it.
These Woodbrookc Studies deserve the attention of all students interested in the problem of apocalyptical and apocryphal literature generally, and in particular in the problem of the Fourth Gospel and its provenance.
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